Showing posts with label India. Show all posts

My new book

Souvik Thursday, September 01, 2022 , , , , No comments

 So my new book is out. You can get it on the Bloomsbury website: https://www.bloomsbury.com/in/videogames-in-the-indian-subcontinent-9789354356919/

Here's what it is about:

Description

Videogames in the Indian Subcontinent: Development, Culture(s) and Representations explores the gaming culture of one of the most culturally diverse and populous regions of the world-the Indian subcontinent. Building on the author's earlier work on videogame culture in India, this book addresses issues of how discussions of equality and diversity sit within videogame studies, particularly in connection with the subcontinent, thereby presenting pioneering research on the videogame cultures of the region.
Drawing on a series of player and developer interviews and surveys conducted over the last five years, including some recent ones, this book provides a sense of how games have become a part of the culture of the region despite its huge diversity and plurality and opens up avenues for further study through vignettes and snapshots of the diverse gaming culture. It addresses the rapid rise of videogames as an entertainment medium in South Asia and, as such, also tries to better understand the recent controversies connected to gaming in the region In the process, it aims to make a larger connection between the development of videogames and player culture, in the subcontinent and globally, thus opening up channels for collaboration between the industry and academic research, local and global.

Table of Contents

Videogames in the Indian Subcontinent
Section One: Development
1 Digital Technology and Videogames in the Indian Subcontinent: An Attempted History
2 The Videogame Industry in the Indian Subcontinent: The Current Scenario
Section Two: Cultures
3 Diverse Subcontinent, Ludic Cultures: The Non-Digital Game Cultures as Context
4 Digital Gaming Cultures in the Indian Subcontinent
Section Three: Representation
5 Representations of the Subcontinent in Videogames Global and Local
6 Absent Discourses in Game Cultures: The Case for Diversity
7 What Wakens the Sleeping Giant?
Bibliography
Appendix One: Timeline
Appendix Two: Survey
Glossary
Ludography



Game Studies India Adda to DiGRA India

Souvik Thursday, August 05, 2021 , , No comments

Suniti Chattopadhyay, in his 1913 article ‘Hostel Life in Calcutta’, describes adda as 'a social activity or a space for a carefree talk with boon companions'. In Games Studies, because of the nature of the area, things are much more flexible and easygoing than in most other academic circles. Bringing Games Studies to India has always been my dream. Or at any rate, it has been for the past twenty years. What better mode of bringing Game Studies scholars in India together than an adda. A carefree chat about games without the fear of being shushed. And in a country that has one of the largest and most diverse gaming populations yet is not on the games research and development radar, it was necessary to get the conversation going. Especially when there are so many who have such fantastic ideas about games and gamers. In 2019, when I organised the GamesLit conference in Kolkata (arguably the first international Games Studies conference in India), the high quality of the papers from India impressed not just me but also my colleagues from abroad. It was Espen Aarseth who asked me why I was not setting up something whereby we could have a games research community in India. The thought remained with me and during the pandemic, I decided to take the plunge by roping in some talented young researchers who I thought would be able to carry on the discussion, giving it a local flavour (through the adda mode) while also participating in the international network.


Today, after ten months of our existence as Games Studies India, we have been recognised as a chapter of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA). We are now DiGRA India. It is a dream come true for me that after two decades, digital games studies now has a platform for debate and discussion in India. DiGRA India, in its earlier avatar, Games Studies India Adda, has featured talks by eminent scholars and industry experts from both India and abroad. These can be accessed on our YouTube channel, here. As DiGRA India starts functioning we hope that we can connect the research on India's gaming culture to the rest of the world.

Check out DiGRA India on our website: https://digraindia.com/



The Buddha Does Not Play Dice

Souvik Thursday, April 14, 2016 , , No comments
Einstein, unhappy about claims of an uncertain universe, famously said 'God does not play dice.' The scientist, later proved wrong, was referring to dice as an aleatory game that he certainly could not see God playing. Moving over from monotheism to the Hindu pantheon, the story is different. Apparently, the universe and everything in it is the product of the divine game of dice that paintings all over India depict Shiva and his consort, Parvati, playing. Here's an extreme contrast, however: the Buddha not only does not play dice, he is against playing almost anything at all. A while ago now, Jesper Juul, who has been besides an authority on many aspects of game studies, a very perceptive thinker on the history of games, raised the question about why the Buddha took such a stand. Way back in 2007, Juul asked the following question in his blog, The Ludologist:
Why wouldn’t he play them? Without going into theology I know nothing about (and without offending anyone), my understanding is that Buddha could not have been a sore loser, so it must have to do with the more formal properties of the games themselves. Neither rules ( board games sized 8 or 10), fiction (toy windmills), nor ilinx escape criticism.
So this I’d like to know: which games would he play, and why?
I met Jesper for the second time shortly afterwards while I was presenting a paper on Indic philosophy's treatment of Karma and how it relates to videogames. He asked me about the roots of ancient Indian games and I realised that I knew very little about my own culture, courtesy my very  colonial education. The Buddha's attitude to games was something that I stumbled upon in Juul's blog and it has bothered me since. Today, after Paolo Pedercini tweeted the same question  nine years later, there are many posts on my Facebook feed about the Buddha and games. Some are flippant and some are genuinely curious. After all, it is difficult to imagine the 'cool' notion of the ever-tolerant Buddha (whether  depicted as laughing or sombre) to be against the very principle of play. Look on the discussion forums and you are certain to come across Buddhists asking whether it is wrong for them to play videogames because of the violence in some of them (that is against the Buddhist Ahimsa or non-violence). To stop play altogether, though? Now that's a tough one. 



[Buddhas Playing a Game by Willie Kendrick III, http://www.digitalartistdaily.com/image/11160/buddhas_playing_a_game]


To answer Juul's question (and everyone else's), the key thing to consider the full import of what the Buddha says. The writer of an article on this in Wikipedia quotes the Brahmajjala Sutta (Sutras are the holy and philosophical texts of Buddhism - the  Heart Sutra is one of the more commonly discussed ones in the West). The Buddha states the following about boardgames:
"Or he might say: "Whereas some honorable recluses and brahmins, while living on food offered by the faithful, indulge in the following games that are a basis for negligence:[1]aṭṭhapada (a game played on an eight-row chess-board); dasapada (a game played on a ten-row chess-board); ākāsa (a game of the same type played by imagining a board in the air); parihārapatha ("hopscotch," a diagram is drawn on the ground and one has to jump in the allowable spaces avoiding the lines); santika ("spellicans," assembling the pieces in a pile, removing and returning them without disturbing the pile); khalika (dice games); ghaṭika(hitting a short stick with a long stick); salākahattha (a game played by dipping the hand in paint or dye, striking the ground or a wall, and requiring the participants to show the figure of an elephant, a horse etc.); akkha (ball games); paṅgacīra (blowing through toy pipes made of leaves); vaṅkaka (ploughing with miniature ploughs); mokkhacika (turning somersaults); ciṅgulika (playing with paper windmills); pattāḷaka (playing with toy measures); rathaka (playing with toy chariots); dhanuka (playing with toy bows); akkharika(guessing at letters written in the air or on one's back); manesika (guessing others' thoughts); yathāvajja (games involving mimicry of deformities) — the recluse Gotama abstains from such games and recreations.'
That's a long list of games, everyone has commented. So why does he not like them? The truth is that the Wikipedia list does a half-job of it all. What the Buddha says is more like this:

It is, monks, for elementary, inferior matters of moral practice   that the worldling would praise the Tathágata. And what are these elementary, inferior matters for which the worldling would praise him? [...] Whereas some ascetics and Brahmins … remain addicted to attending such shows as dancing,  singing,  music, displays, recitations, hand-music, cymbals and drums, fairy-shows,  acrobatic and conjuring tricks, combats of elephants, buffaloes, bulls, goats, rams, cocks and quail, fighting with staves, boxing, wrestling, sham-fights, parades, maneuvers and military reviews, the ascetic Gotama refrains from attending such displays. Whereas some ascetics and Brahmins remain addicted to such games and idle pursuits as eight- or ten-row chess, chess in the air,  hopscotch, spillikins, dicing, hitting sticks, 'hand-pictures', ball-games, blowing through toy pipes, playing with toy ploughs, turning somersaults, playing with toy windmills, measures, carriages, and bows, guessing letters,  guessing thoughts,  mimicking deformities, the ascetic Gotama refrains from such idle pursuits.
Whereas some ascetics and Brahmins remain addicted to high and wide beds and long chairs, couches adorned with animal figures,  fleecy or variegated coverlets, coverlets with hair on both sides or one side, silk coverlets, embroidered with gems or without, elephant-, horse- or chariot-rugs, choice spreads of antelope-hide, couches with awnings, or with red cushions at both ends, the ascetic Gotama refrains from such high and wide beds. [...] There are, monks, other matters, profound, hard to see, hard to understand, peaceful, excellent, beyond mere thought, subtle, to be experienced by the wise, which the Tathágata, having realized them by his own super-knowledge, proclaims, and about which those who would truthfully praise the Tathágata would rightly speak. (My italics)
The full comment is often ignored. The Buddha isn't talking about hating a few games and listing them; he's saying that it is worldly people who praise him from abstaining from these games just as they praise him for not going to dances or boxing matches. Let's get one thing clear. The Buddha doesn't have a special grudge against board-games. As the prince Siddhartha in Kapilavastu (in modern Nepal), we know that he did let loose an arrow in an archery contest (something he has purportedly criticised in his list of games). What he is saying something very different. 

The world may think that the Buddha doesn't play games because they are immoral and cause people to neglect their work but the Buddha is not everyone else. That much we can agree to, certainly, right? In fact, the moral rectitude that the worldly people might praise him for is the least of their problems that the Buddha points out. They also wonder about the mutability of the self, the finiteness and the infiniteness of the world and things thought to be profounder than whether not playing games also means not neglecting your work and being morally correct. 

What the Buddha is all about is what he states at the end of the long and complex discourse in the sutra: 
There are, monks, other matters, profound, hard to see, hard to understand, peaceful, excellent, beyond mere thought, subtle, to be experienced by the wise, which the Tathágata, having realized them by his own super-knowledge, proclaims, and about which those who would truthfully praise the Tathágata would rightly speak.
In the beginning of the text, he hears two of his monks defending him against the fierce criticism of someone who does not believe in his teachings. In this long and detailed answer, the Buddha expresses the nature of Buddhahood: something that is beyond thought and part of his own super-knowledge. The understanding of the Buddha or the Tathagata (literally 'he who has come' or 'he who has gone', the name the Buddha refers to himself by) transcends all of these. The Buddha is at perfect peace and 'having understood as they really are the origin and the passing away of feelings, their satisfaction, their unsatisfactoriness, and the escape from them, the Tathāgata, bhikkhus, is emancipated through non-clinging.'

The Buddha, or the Enlightened One, is beyond games but only because he is beyond anything worldly. There are accounts where boardgames are a major part of Buddhist learning. Consider, for example, the Buddhist monk Sakya Pandit's creation of the Tibetan Game of Liberation to teach the notion of karma to his co-religionists. Jens Schlieter has an essay on the game that I'd strongly recommend. 

In a recent talk that I plan to turn into a paper, I plan to explore this with a few discoveries that will potentially add to Schlieter's research and make clearer links with game studies. For that, I will have to tell you about my adventures in Rochester - in the next blog post, perhaps. 

* I've been a bit lazy with the citations but the quotes have been taken from the translation (from Pali) by Bhikkhu Bodhi (available here: http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/dn/dn.01.0.bodh.html) and another translation that is available here; http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/dn/dn.01.0.bodh.html. 
** I am grateful to Annika Waern and Mohini Freya Dutta for raising this in their respective Facebook posts.



Times of India Article on Reviving Gyan Chaupar and Golok Dham

Souvik Monday, July 06, 2015 , , , , , No comments
It was a whim that I pursued about finding storytelling elements in ancient games - just to prove that the point I was making in my book was vindicated by aeons of human history. It was Jesper Juul who put me on to it - he asked me at a conference (where I was presenting on Karma in videogames) what ancient Indian games and game theory had to say about play cultures. Jesper knew about the khel / lila concepts and I wasn't surprised given the thorough scholar that he is. However, what he set me thinking about was Pacheesi or Chaupar and Chaturanga. Now, as many know, I'm a Deleuzian at heart and although my attempts to connect Deleuze with Indian philosophy have been resisted by some, I couldn't help connecting the Deleuzian notion of the 'Divine Game' (see Difference and Repetition) to Indian philosophy. Somewhere from my childhood, I remembered tales of Shiva and Parvati playing a divine game of dice.  As I was writing my book (Videogames and Storytelling to be published by Palgrave Macmillan this year), I thought I simply had to find out. With my research, I stumbled on Gyan Chaupar. I also found scholars who had already worked on it. Typically, videogame studies does not seem to have connected with them.

Gyan Chaupar board in the National Museum, New Delhi



My friend, Subhayu Mazumder, of Times of India said he liked the idea. And off I went to do more research. The first fruits of this has appeared in an article in ToI and I have plans to do more with this. Here's an excerpt of the article:

Imagine being told that whatever happens in your life is the result of a game that you have been playing. This is not the plot of a Hollywood thriller but rather the now much-neglected wisdom of ancient India. As you try to contain your incredulity, what if I tell you that this is no rare artefact that has been unearthed by archaeologists but that you probably even have it at home as you read this.  The game being referred to here is Snakes and Ladders, commonly translated as ‘Shap Ludo’ or Snake-Ludo in Bengali. Unknown to many of us, Snakes and Ladders is not a game that Indians learnt from the West; in fact, it is quite the other way round. Known variously as Gyan Chaupar, Gyan Bazi or Moksha Pat, the game with snakes and stairs (rather than ladders) was popular all over ancient India and even survives in various forms in Nepal and Tibet. Exported into England first in 1892, this complex and intricate game of moral teaching ended up as a childishly simple racing game that removed the element of learning and introduced competition. More research into this game revealed articles by a handful of scholars from the United Kingdom and Scandinavia and references to game-boards scattered across the world, only a few of them in different parts of India. Even Reverend Lal Behari De’s 1851 article on Bengali games and pastimes had nothing to say about games such as Gyan Chaupar. Strangely though, there is now much more hope for the revival of this ancient Indian tradition of play than one could ever expect and the story begins with an industrialist in Calcutta who quite accidentally stumbled upon this lost gem and since then, has been working non-stop to bring back Gyan Chaupar to our homes and our minds. 


Aman Gopal Sureka, one of the city’s information technology entrepreneurs, came upon Gyan Chaupar while looking for interesting Diwali gifts for his clients. In the process, he fell in love with the game and this has taken him around the world in his quest for Gyan Chaupar. 

For the rest of the article, click here: http://epaperbeta.timesofindia.com/Article.aspx?eid=31812...

Rediscovering Gaming at Khoj

Souvik Tuesday, September 09, 2014 , , No comments

My second time at Khoj. The place of discoveries. In the middle of an area called Khirkee - the door to no one knows what. No doubt there was a gate here or a door there in the days of yore. Now, the landscape is a heap of broken images - very wasteland, post-apocalyptic almost.  on entering you pass a huge garbage heap where cows, horses and humans on charpoys are equally at ease with each other and the rubble around them. It has rained and the mud pools make the contrast with the swank mall opposite so much more sharp. The community in Khirkee, they tell me, is a mix of the migrant poor and expats from the not-so-rich countries. The walls are full of bizarre graffiti - the Buddha with a gas mask ( which was there last year too) and another which the words 'red', 'pink' and 'green' on a whitewashed wall. Behind it, a huge house lies derelict and has opened its innards for the world to see. In front, a man is busy making samosas on top of a hand-cart. Kind of breaking into my reverie, there was this game called Home. I'll come to it in a moment. For now, it is the hotel where I lived that must speak of ... Flourish Inn, an intelligent pun on the purpose for which it has been built. Apparently, it serves those who come to India for health tourism as I found out later ( to some trepidation I admit). The Max hospital is close by. The doorbell rang and I answered it to find a Central Asian looking woman with a hijab standing at the door. Seeing me she vigorously shook her head - wrong country. In the hallway I heard someone speaking some unknown language. A dark man with dreadlocks was on  the phone.  Why Khirkee and its environs form such a multicultural hub I do not know but in the general assumption that one has of the ever assimilating and welcoming India, this diversity is almost a given and one wouldn't blink really to see foreign and unfamiliar faces in the middle of the capital city. Recent events, however, have changed things drastically with a political leader encouraging acts of racism against two African residents.


The story of Indians being deported from Africa is not new. My friends who escaped  Amin's regime will have many stories. The  reverse, however, albeit unknown until now, might well have its seeds being sown: Home, the game is about one's sense of belonging especially when one is uprooted from what one thinks one belongs to. Set in the Delhi of the future, in the aftermath of race riots and the consequent preventive deportation by the government, the game describes the dream that a Senegalese girl has about the place where she grew up and from where she has been deported. Sent back 'home' is what the governments call it though. She tells her brother about Khirkee where she lived and went to school. But she can only describe it in her dream. Set in the bloodshot red  background of a future -day Khirkee, the game shows that maze of narrow lanes where I keep losing my way. The two swank malls on the other side of he road have disappeared in the game's landscape. Instead you have huge billboards with scraps of text from the letters she wrote to her brother. You encounter no passers-by - only paramilitary personnel walking by in twos. Auto-ricks haws and cars whiz by and you can cross the road and enter the maze of  Khirkee. As you look for your home you find cut up pieces of the letters that you wrote and your journey within that red dream that you are having is your identity. Home is the creation of Vinit, who is an architect by profession and a game designer only sometimes. I played the game only when it was being set up and thereafter, I kept going back to watch others play. Yes, watch other get lost in the bylans of Khirkee and feel my head swimming as I too lost the bearings of identity. Especially when I remembered my own rootlessness or maybe 'hiraeth' that Welsh word for longing for a home that is not your home, when I had to leave Nottingham after those seven years when I felt I had finally had a home. 

'It's Khirkee that does things to people'. Shraddha was on her smoking break when I walked into her 'installation'. Although it's not one but many installations and you will still find them in unexpected corners of Khirkee long after the four-day exhibition is over. Did I tell you that the Khoj Artists' Residency ends on Monday. Do go and visit if you are in Delhi. So Shraddha has been painting game boards and leaving them for people to use and it is fascinating for her to see random people, adults even, gather at odd times to play a game of Bagh Bakri or Parcheesi on the streetside makeshift boards that she builds for them. In the extremely male world of nighttime Khirkee, to look at the huddles of tired textile workers suddenly coming to life over painted boards of all those games that we learn in childhood and then spend the rest of our lives forgetting. So as parts of Khirkee spring into action to become game boards at random points of time, I move on to the others designers at Khoj. 

Mohini Freya Datta is Bengali expat and lives in New York designing indie games. Very much on the Indiecade scene, Mohini now has had a good look at the Indian Indie developers. I look forward to a connect between Indiecade and the Nasscom GDC. Mohini's game board is a city but it's a city that becomes itself only when you decide so and how you decide so. It's a game space that is all about negotiating the game rules for yourself. Mohini has a slew of interesting games in her kitty and you can find out about them here:     . From Mohini's installation, and after a couple of cigarettes, I went over to look for Krishnarjun, who has this uber-cool board game where four mythical creatures each from a different cultural mythos, tries to become real. The game, a three and half hour board game played with 159 cards, had the players engrossed for over three hours and it was fun to see the flailing arms and the general mayhem around the game board. Krishnarjun has also written a book on an alternate reality Jadavpur University and I’m looking forward to visiting my alternate-reality alma mater. My own talk was on the broad and rather ambitious topic of videogames in India. A bit stats heavy (I was trying to make some sense of the industry with Padmini Ray Murray), it might have been a tad daunting for those who came for a more artistic discussion. I did introduce a few problem ideas about how India is (mis)represented in videogames and also how karma and avatar are words that are so loosely used in gaming parlance without exploring their roots.



As a very interesting mix of people milled around the passages of Khoj, I took a walk down Khirkee looking for those game boards that Shraddha has placed. A casual stroll turned into a memory-lane walk as I stood face-to-face with the Buddha of the gas mask.
Keynoting at Khoj

Another Keynote Lecture: Videogames in India

Souvik Monday, February 10, 2014 , No comments
2014 started with yet another visit to Delhi. I was invited to be part of the keynote panel on Indian videogaming, together with Dr Padmini Ray Murray from the University of Stirling. It was great to be back at JNU and I had some productive discussions, especially with the team from the University of West Virginia and Siddhartha from the JNU team. It was a pleasure to meet Dr Lyle Skains after over three years now (we met in Bangor in 2010) and to skype with Dr Astrid Ensslin about LOTRO MOOC and its relevance to higher education. Dr Sandy Baldwin of UWV spoke on how his team played out (pun intended) Samuel Beckett's Endgame  within CounterStrike 2 and the artistic and philosophical implications of such theatrical interventions in the game-world. Dibyoduti Roy impressed me with his take on the experience of the quotidian in videogames. I felt that he has something new to contribute to how we think through gameplay. His colleague, Kwabena, spoke on WoW but I was more interested in what he had to say about gaming in Ghana (and in other African countries) when we had some time to chat over coffee. At the JNU end, I liked a paper on postcolonial representations in videogames  - something I've worked on recently (for my paper at Bergen). Sid, who was presenting the paper, focused on Far Cry 2 and Assassin's Creed and pointed at racial and imperial stereotypes made by Ubisoft. I did come to Ubisoft's defence though, as I seriously believe that the Ubisoft games are mostly fairly nuanced and good at problematising issues.  I shan't use this space to go into a sustained argument on this but I am happy to defend my position, any time.

I am getting into the habit of writing my conference reports rather late and as such, my memory plays tricks with me. The highlight of my stay was my meeting Quicksand, one of the most 'thinking'game developers I've met in India so far. These are the guys who made Meghdoot, which Murray describes thus:
Meghdoot: Using new technologies to tell age-old stories is a project that will be based around a prototype of a game Meghdoot that was developed in the first phase of the Unbox Fellowship. Meghdoot draws on features of Indian culture such as gestural movements from Indian dance in gameplay and is inspired by using narrative structures drawn from Indian mythology, making a conscious choice to move away from Anglo-Saxon linear sequences in the game's design and deploys an aesthetic that is inspired by Indian heritage artefacts but does not resort to usual tropes of the exotic or the oriental. Meghdoot will fall into the increasingly popular category of ‘serious art game’
I left Quicksand after making them promise that they would visit Calcutta and that some of the bylanes in Chitpore would feature in their next game (about which, mum is the word). Time to get away from fun and games and back to work.

NASSCOM Games Development Conference 2013, Pune

Souvik Wednesday, January 15, 2014 , , 2 comments


Me: Marriott jana hay.
Taxi Driver: Kaun sa Marriott? Pune mein to chaar Marriott hay!
(I need to get to the Marriott in Pune and I ask the taxi driver to take me there. He asks me which one – there are four Marriotts in Pune!)

This was my second visit to Pune. The comparative opulence and cleanliness had me surprised. As had the women on scooties and in trendy clothes but with their face covered except for the eyes. I crossed the historic Yerawada Jail and then entered downtown Pune with its Maratha gateways and modern shopping malls. I had reached the right Marriott.

And inside it was gaming like I had never known before in India. There were stalls with mainstream game studios and indies showcasing their work; Julie Heyde, eminent indie designer from Copenhagen was letting people have a taste of the Oculus Rift. I saw a perfectly staid saree-clad PR lady who had never done any gaming go crazy with the virtual world coming alive around her.
I had to say hello to old friends. The videogame industry in India is a friendly place. Rajesh Rao of Dhruva (one of the pioneers of gaming in India) casually walked over and chatted for a bit. He was featured in a recent article on Indian videogaming by Adrienne Shaw, I told him. And of course in mine. I had just missed Yoichi Wada’s keynote (of Square Enix fame) because the plane was a little late. I walked into the ‘Project Heera’ presentation by Tanmay Chinchkar. The BAFTA tag drew me in automatically. So Tanmay, a student of DSK Supinfocomm, has designed this awesome game which is kind of in the ‘chor-police’ (cops and robbers) tradition and the multiplayer experience has you playing either as the cop or as the robber, protecting or stealing diamonds, as the case may be.  Simple mechanic and as Tanmay’s post-mortem revealed, there was quite a bit of excitement in the BAFTA stands when they got two leading gamers from Codemasters to compete against each other and win prizes. So clever promotion tactics, a decent GUI  and of course, an addictive multiplayer experience is clearly a winning formula. Whatever little I saw and played of Heera, I liked.



Posing with Lightning and the Halo gun


After a tea break and catch-ups with old friends, I came across Lightning from Final Fantasy – it was Niha Patil cosplaying and we weren’t friends yet. So dodging the sword of Lightning, I was back in the ballroom and ‘Gordon’ Gardeback or the ‘Go’ of Simogo, the celebrity indie developers from Scandinavia was speaking. If nothing else could have made me buy an iOS device, Bumpy Road, Year Walk and Device 6 would have been successful.  What surprised me was how quickly these games were made and of course, the concepts. So here’s a platformer where you are in an old car with your partner driving slowly through a cute Russian-fairytale landscape and collecting memories (which are placed in photoframes). Only you don’t drive the car, as the player you bump the road and the car trundles along. Normally, I have an aversion to overusing the word ‘cute’ but for this game I’ll make an exception. Simogo has also made other internationally acclaimed iOS titles such as Year Walk and Device 6. I haven’t played the former yet but Device 6 is about this story of a girl who finds herself in a tower and her story rolls out (literally) as the player turns and tilts her iPad (or iPhone) as the girl changes direction and the story asks her to do so. I did have to cheat a tiny bit – the puzzle element is hard and I was often confused. I liked Device 6  a lot though and I think that makes me part of a huge group of fans now.

After the Simogo talk, I went to watch those who were trying out the Oculus Rift that Julie Heyde had brought along. Julie had been one of the judges on the indie panel with me – the other being the extremely helpful and super-modest Divyendra Singh Rathore. Soon I was chatting with Divyendra and catching up with friends when I met. I was introduced to Arvind who is building his MMORPG called Unrest and has based it on ancient India. The game is still in development and we learned about the problems that Indian game devs have to face on a regular basis – power failures, low bandwidth, cut Internet cables and other joys of game dev in India. Unrest looked like it was heavily story-based and very similar to adventure games but I’ll wait and hold my breath. The project is on Kickstarter for any who wish to learn more. From there I went to a panel on Indie game development and again, the scenario was very well defined for us by Shailesh Prabhu and Yadu Rajiv. Funding still seems to be a problem but there is a lot of dedication and watch out for some good indie stuff from this part of the world.

As I said, I was a judge on the indie panel and none of us had any doubts about Yellow Monkey Studio’s Huebrix as the top choice of them all (we reviewed around twenty five games in all). Huebrix is, as its name suggests, about colours and bricks and the objective is to solve puzzles that involve covering pathways with bricks of a certain colour and specific affordances. Deceptively simple, says I. As you get through the levels with the designer’s subtle sarcasm talking back at your achievements, be prepared to tax your brains immensely.  Huebrix is now available on the iOS and Android stores. Our runner-up was Sandy Loisa’s pc game Save the Dummy. I have written about this at length in my Times of India column ‘Game Theory’ and as the developer hails from Calcutta (my hometown), I feel a surge of hope for game development in Eastern India. But of that, perhaps another day. I covered many talks – by Microsoft (who did a standard ‘why we are great’ spiel and never mentioned Xbox One), Facebook (much interest from young developers here) and Disney UTV (Hrishi Oberoi spoke of the need to have a Sholay of videogames to promote Indian gaming).  I also ended up at a session on game related laws in India and while this was very informative, the fact that the speakers hadn’t ever played a videogame was kind of disappointing.

Anyway, this is indeed a very late post – two months late in fact. Better late than never as they say, though. I have to thank Dr Padmini Ray Murray for making my trip possible in the first place (from her AHRC project , on which I am a consultant) and also Joel Johnson, that wonderful man behind organizing the NASSCOM Game Awards – the first time ever in the country. Finally, of course, Shruti Verma and Vijay Sinha, the two stars of Indian videogaming without whom I would have been very lost indeed in the huge crowds of game devs and others that filled up the halls of The Marriott.








Old Friends, Old Games: No One Lives Forever 2 in Kolkata

Souvik Tuesday, November 12, 2013 , , , No comments
Subhayu Mazumder is easily one of my oldest friends. We started in the same section at kindergarten, continued together throughout our schooldays and then went on to read English Lit together at university. We don't meet often but he's one of those people you have on your thoughts even during a random bus ride through this busy city and then, out of the blue, he's on the phone nattering away at breakneck speed, providing unnecessary explanations and spewing ideas (with which you might not always agree but then again, there's no deterring him). Together with Sanjay Banerjee, we had started our school's first (arguably) literary wallpaper, 'My Back Pages'  and had those many adventures that only extremely curious and creative (or so I'd like to think) teenagers can possibly have. Looking back now, they seem other lives, other videogames.

So Subhayu wanted me to write an article on gaming for The Times of India and I said I'd bite. Readers of Ludus Ex will know that I've been doing everything I can to push the importance of games research to the Indian academia, the videogame industry and the policymaking gods. The article itself needed a Kolkata focus so after saying the usual and making my case about the potential of gaming here, I remembered another old friend. A virtual one this time - Cate Archer from No One Lives Forever 2. NOLF seems to have disappeared even from the second-hand markets as Emil Hammar was telling me when we were in Bergen last month. NOLF is the only videogame I know with a direct Calcutta connection. So this is an excerpt from what I wrote:

Unknown to most gamers, this is the first Indian city (arguably) to have been featured in a major gaming title. Cate Archer, the British spy famous for her Bond-like skills and her lipstick spycam, comes to Calcutta in the 2002 videogame No One Lives Forever 2. For the first time in videogames, the gamer (a.k.a  Archer) can move around the bylanes of Kolkata and fight corrupt policemen and goons. Archer is sent to Kolkata to meet someone with the unlikely name of Balaji Malpani  and will have to pay a local the handsome sum of forty rupees to be given a city tour before she can start taking out the operatives of the criminal organization H.A.R.M. Archer then travels to Siberia, Japan and Greece to fight super-soldiers and Soviet troops.

Cate Archer in the bye-lanes of Calcutta

NOLF 2 has not had a sequel to date but from what the reviews  of the gameplay testify, Calcutta was a great game setting and one would hope that after the Cate Archers, the James Bonds and the Assassin’s Creed heroes would make the city their next stop.  So here’s raising a virtual glass to more videogames and a healthy gaming culture in Kolkata.

Digital Humanities Consultation - IISc Bangalore

Souvik Monday, July 15, 2013 , No comments
I confronted that old ghost yet again: that ever worrying question ‘What is Digital Humanities?’ Like any spectre, this one too is substance-less yet present. It is like the proverbial trace – the mark that remains when the thing itself is not there.

A spectre is haunting us; the spectre of (the) Digital Humanities. Is it here to replace the Humanities or to take away the primacy of the Sciences? The spectre never ceases to scare.  At IISc Bangalore, scholars from all over the country (well, almost) met for a ‘consultation’ on designing curricula on the Digital Humanities. It is here that the spectre rose again. For those interested in a more objective account,  Sara Morais of CIS has taken detailed notes of the entire proceedings and these should be available on the CIS website. This blog post, however, is about my subjective and often impressionistic engagement with the spectre that I mention.

There was much discussion about the very origin of research on digital media and its use in India.  Ravi Sundaram of SARAI spoke about the Sarai mailing list, that excellent and incessant (later somewhat annoyingly so) resource that filled up my mailboxes with news of cutting-edge research that would have been impossible without Sarai funding. He spoke of Media Nagar, where contributors published and posted online and of his experience, in the early days of digital archiving, with the Labour History archive. Questions were asked about how we can set up collaborative networks and research writing through text culture. Nishant Shah of CIS, on Skype from Germany and after suffering the travails of the digital incompetence of the Indian passport office, expressed skepticism at the growing enthusiasm about DH.  According to him, in a world which considers data the sole reality, the time-honoured close-reading that is part of the Humanities is about to suffer a sad end. This met some stiff opposition from respondents (including yours truly) who saw close-reading as always have gone hand in hand with data analysis. Indeed, think of the concordances and unique tools that have been used since time immemorial by scholars close reading literary texts.


Messing up the order of the presentations somewhat, I think I need to mention one of the most hands-on papers of the day. Tanveer and Asha presented on their four-year project of bringing ICT closer to less privileged children from schools and colleges in different states in India. It was interesting how, according to their research, the children and their teachers were quick to dissociate the digital from the Humanities and how the less privileged children took to the Humanities easier than those who were more affluent. A quick point to note here is that the Humanities experience of these children was digitally mediated anyway (via Facebook, Youtube etc) so the distinction does not really hold. It is perhaps indicative of a mindset that takes to a watertight categorisation more easily because of the comfort that such fixed and finite parameters posit. Ashish of IISc spoke about Digital Ecosystems, using the Indian Government’s UID (Universal Identity ) or aadhar project as his key example. Jim Nye, of Loyola University, Chicago reiterated the need to teach people how to handle analogue material before allowing any digitisation initiatives to be started. He cited the instance of the destruction of invaluable of archival material in Urdu due to the ignorance of the team that attempted to digitise these texts. Nye also expressed the need for DH initiatives in India to link with those elsewhere on the subcontinent.

However, the major ‘find’ for me was Arun Menon – a fellow game studies scholar when I had lost all hope in finding a kindred soul in India (can you believe it!) and someone who, like me, ekes out his living doing other things while secretly remaining committed to the cause of bringing gaming to academia. Arun and I will have many occasions to disagree, especially when it comes to the telos in videogames and suchlike things. However, there is much synergy in our work and it is heartening to see people like Arun braving all odds and correcting Masters papers on videogames written by students from English departments. Arun’s paper was on the potential risks of digital humanities. He sees in DH initiatives an intense need to legitimise the Humanities by inserting or adding-on a statistical rigour and a faux scientism (my phrase). He sees as some kind of last-ditch response of a Humanities that is in crisis. Because of DH, it is possible that the traditional Humanities will be taken to task and the support that could have come to the Humanities as such will shift to DH. Again, a spectre.

I do not agree with such a conclusion but I think I understand where this is coming from. Here is some brave and plain speaking that needs to be respected for what it is. The statistical fetish that DH has shown since its recent birth and the beeline that many Humanities scholars who still cannot tell the difference between Excel and excellence have made towards DH, is indicative of the fact that DH is the ‘in’ thing today. Suddenly my research on gaming has become respectable and even newspapers are writing about me; shouldn’t I be a happy boy now! Educational bodies and research councils have started moving their lumbering girths towards a digital starry-eyed future. Arun is right: the reason behind the sudden focus on DH is a problem. However, as he half apologetically says, DH escapes disciplinarity. So what the heck is going on?
Before I attempt an answer, I will need to bring in another person into this gameplay. Amlan Dasgupta’s contribution to DH in India (together with that of Sukanta Chaudhuri) is of phenomenal import and the recent Bichitra project or the online Tagore variorum, completed at Jadavpur University, is perhaps the single largest such DH project in the world. How they managed to get this done I do not know  … or maybe I do know – my few trips to the School of Cultural Texts and Records revealed how extremely dedicated and smart their team was. But I digress – Bichitra deserves a much more thorough analysis in a separate space of its own.  I was about to mention a few key points that Sir  raised in relation to the future of DH in India.  First, he stressed the importance of teaching Digital Humanists how to handle analogue material (so that no more archives get messed up!); secondly, he insisted on the importance of developing and tweaking tools to suit specific operations in DH and finally, he agreed with me and stated in no uncertain terms that DH is not a discipline but is rather an ‘indiscipline’ or non-discipline. Arguing that DH has entered its third-wave, he wondered aloud about digital surrogacy. So, is the  Bichitra archive a digital surrogate? I would think not but the question intrigues me still. The other major point that Sir made was about the incompleteness of the archive – the archive is always being added to and there is no single heroic authorial character here. It is a community at work. Through and through. And of course, it is not possible to ask whether you are digital or whether you are a humanist.


(Fig) My Presentation

I will not dwell on what I had to say as I have discussed my thoughts many times on ‘Ludus Ex’. Suffice it to say that I made a strong claim that DH is not a discipline and that its fun lies in its being a (non) discipline. It is possible to teach it as a discipline if one is after convincing funding bodies but then that’s like creating a Theory discipline in the same way that we have Film Studies or Cultural Studies. DH, is for me, a research modality and not a discipline. Whatever it is, it certainly does not mean digital archiving alone; if it did, we would have called it so. I stressed the importance of Digital Culture, introduced Game Studies and showed everyone the splendid microfiction that Presidency students have been creating on Facebook. I ended with a Youtube of an Indian bureaucrat vehemently insisting that having data on the Cloud was disastrous as vital datasets could be lost when the cloud started raining! The moral was plain: DH teaching and research needs to take into account digital and web 2.0 processes and technology seriously. An old-guard luddite turned sudden digital humanist will struggle if he or she is not able to engage with technology. I’m not a techie can be an excuse for a few days at most but if we want to do DH, then as the Digital Humanities Manifesto says, ‘Let’s get our hands dirty.’ That is the only way in which I can face the spectre: by engaging with DH and doing so smartly.

Videogames in India: A Research Survey

Souvik Thursday, March 07, 2013 , 1 comment
I conducted a small-scale survey among the members of the Nasscom Gaming Forum on Facebook for my book chapter on videogames in India. I received 29 responses in all - not much one could call it indicative, I guess. Thought I'd share some of the stats especially as not many such survey results are freely available:

Which videogame genre do you prefer playing most?

Which age group do you belong to?
Please state your gender

What platform do you design your games for?



How is the Indian gaming industry faring currently, according to you?



How much time do you think will be required to bring the Indian gaming industry to world standards?


How important do you think storytelling is to the gameplay experience? (This question is slightly unrelated to the rest and was asked with my research on narratives in mind but I thought I'd include it anyway)

My presentation at NGDC, Pune

Souvik Sunday, January 27, 2013 , No comments
So, here's another very long overdue post. Partly, because my students have been asking me ...

Researching the Videogame Industry in India: Naive Questions That I Asked Myself Over A Year Ago

Souvik Sunday, September 30, 2012 , No comments

Just found this while clearing my Dropbox junk. Fresh from the UK and with a lot more enthusiasm than I have now, I framed these questions for an academic at one of the famous 'centres' of research in India who had requested such a list. The said academic never replied. Wonder why.

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Possible areas of research on the Indian gaming and animation industry

India has been the sleeping giant of the videogame industry for over a decade.  With a billion strong population , India’s image as a potential market for the industry is strong both within the country and abroad.  International players such as Sony,  Ubisoft  and Zynga  are setting up units and testing labs here.  India also has a large number of experienced programmers, creative artists and animators – all three of these being key roles in the videogame industry. Not many academic and training institutions, however, make the connection between animation, programming and the creative arts with the videogame industry. Those that do so concentrate more on either the animation or the programming aspect of game design and they generally do not focus on the sociocultural aspect of gaming that the industry needs to stay informed about; further, they do not take into account the concerns of the Indian gaming industry as such. More traditional academic disciplines also do not engage with the videogame industry in the country. A few key questions, relevant for both businesses and academia, keep arising and remain unanswered. Any academic research on the subject should take into account the following:

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